Dear Editor
The announcement by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of an independent audit to check the accuracy of the Murray-Darling Commission’s assessment of how much water is stored in the system is good news.
What would be even better news would be a review of existing scientific assessments of the amount of water which has been and will be prevented from entering the system by the water hungry tree plantations established in the basin. These plantations were promoted by tax breaks devised by the previous Federal Government through managed investment schemes (MIS).
How about an announcement of an end MIS induced water catchment damage through inappropriately located tree farms and commencement of the necessary restorative action?
Frank Nicklason
West Hobart
Paul de Burgh-Day
August 19, 2008 at 16:28
Frank is absolutely right about this.
It is hard to see anything positive about the taxpayer funded MIS tree plantation schemes – profits for corporations no doubt.
The list of negatives is depressingly long.
+ Having taxpayers of Australia fund the replacement of natural forests and productive food farmland with chemically dependent tree monocultures is clearly an unsustainable environmental disaster.
+ Given the mounting local and global food crisis – in part climate change induced – it is sheer lunacy to be converting productive farmland to tree plantations (which are NOT forests), particularly as this is inevitably taking place where there is still good rainfall.
+ The playing field is heavily tilted by the MIS schemes – which dominantly benefit city fat cats trying to avoid their tax responsibilities. Farmers who produce food are faced with ever higher costs and bureaucratic obstacles (PAL for example). The better to make their land available to plantation corporations.
This is outrageous!
+ Compelling evidence is building up to show that conversion of natural forests to plantations is a huge carbon minus. Claims to the contrary are industry fabrications. It is now very clear that natural forests represent an enormous economic benefit through the value of stored carbon – it appears to be at least three times the previous estimates.
+ Water is a critical issue with plantations. MIS schemes are destroying the hydrology of Tasmania – and higher rainfall zones on the mainland. Plantation promoters with their huge taxpayer funded incentives, focus on the upper catchments. The inevitable consequence of planting tracts of plantations is that they suck up both surface and groundwater. All over Tasmania, streams and springs are drying up – exacerbated by ever decreasing and redistributed rainfall. Farmers and rural communities are faced with deteriorating water supply – leading to ever more dubious and expensive schemes to dam and relocate scarce water.
+ It is an outrage that plantation promoters get our valuable water for free! They are in fact getting yet another subsidy. This MUST STOP!
For as long as our governments are doing the bidding of corporations, nothing will change. Canberra considers Tasmania is here to be trashed. Our state government has been totally complicit in this. Ever more taxpayer funds are being used to prop up the corporations that are trashing our state.
My fellow Tasmanians! Why do we put up with it??
Right now, with our new Premier, we might – just might – have the best chance we have had to change direction!
Let us all encourage David Bartlett to ‘see the light’.